Keep Copperas Cove Beautiful Day held with community cleanup

By BRITTANY FHOLER
Cove Leader-Press

More than 100 volunteers showed up Saturday morning to help clean up their community for the second annual Keep Copperas Cove Beautiful Day. 
A total of 111 volunteers met in the parking lot of McAlister’s Deli early Saturday morning to divide and conquer different areas of beautification and cleanup.  One cleanup was in Heritage Park, where volunteers picked up trash as well as worked on cleaning up graffiti. KCCB Executive Director Roxanne Flores-Achmad said that the last graffiti cleanup at Heritage Park was a year ago. 
Different groups came out to participate in the KCCB Day, including the Copperas Cove Colts and the Copperas Cove Citizens Police Academy Alumni Association, who were on graffiti cleanup. 
The Copperas Cove Colts, a local Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) football and cheerleading club, had 53 volunteers present, according to the club owner/president Rick Ott. These volunteers spent approximately two hours picking up trash in the parking lot around McAlister’s Deli, he said. 
“We wanted to teach the players and cheerleaders about how important helping the community is,” Ott said. “We have to be a part of where we live. Not only is it important to do well in school and be good at the sport you play, but we all have to be good citizens to our local environment as well.” 
Another group of volunteers also worked on a beautification project at City Park, preparing a garden at the old YMCA building that is going to become the building for the Parks and Recreation day camps. Flores-Achmad said that the planting will occur this week on Friday. 
Keep Copperas Cove Beautiful Day was started last year as a way to offer a volunteer opportunity to the community during the summer. 
“It’s a way that people could come out and volunteer, and there’s different beautification projects that they could do,” Flores-Achmad said. “They could pick up litter, or they could do the garden, or they could remove graffiti, or the other thing they could do is the sidewalk cleanup which we did right there near McAlister’s, and so it just kind of reminds them that we’re not just trash pickups. We’re trash pickups, we’re beautification projects, we’re gardens, we are graffiti removal. We’re just so much more. It’s also just coming out and volunteering in your community, and so it just reminds people we are Keep Copperas Cove Beautiful.”
KCCB’s next event will be trash cleanup at South Park on the first Saturday in July, at 8 a.m., to kick off Parks and Recreation Month. 
Nathan Garner, the 2021 Junior Mister Five Hills, is also organizing the Adopt a Road program, where people can sign up to adopt a city street or park or space, where they will be responsible for cleaning that area four times a year. 
For more information on Adopt a Road, contact Keep Copperas Cove Beautiful at kccb@copperascovetx.gov .